by Fumio Sasaki
The biggest force is necessary when a wheel starts to rotate, but once it starts to rotate, not much strength is required to keep it moving. A motor will get a train moving, but inertia can take over from there. The fuel that a rocket uses for the few minutes immediately after launch is greater than the amount used in the eight hundred thousand kilometers to follow.
It’s tough when you first start to study a new language because you can’t make out anything that the other person is saying, but it gets easier when you start to understand more words. So it’s important to remove as many of the obstacles as possible at the moment when you need the most force, and to remove as many of the pebbles that tumble on the road as you can.
Learning from just how low the hurdles are in the habits that you want to quit
For easily addictive actions, the hurdles are frighteningly low. For example, it’s very difficult to distill your own alcohol, but it’s easy to drink. You can go to any convenience store to pick up some beer, and all you have to do is open the can. Cigarettes are small and light, too, and you only have to light them and inhale. Video games and gambling don’t make your muscles scream or cause you to sweat; you only need to move your hands. Smartphones are the same: they’re small and easy to pull out of your pocket, so you come to depend on them. A person opening up and reading a newspaper on the train is a lesser-seen image these days, probably because doing so has become a relatively cumbersome act. The government might be concerned about people’s dependence on smartphones in the future and create a law like this: “Smartphones are not to be made smaller than iPads (at their current size, that is).” That said, Yukio Noguchi writes books while lying on a sofa and dictating to his smartphone. He’s leveraging the low hurdle of smartphones to do his work.
How Amazon lowers the hurdles
I think Amazon is number one when it comes to lowering its hurdles for shoppers. It offers us one-click purchases, and it even lets us tell Alexa to order a soda for us.
When a disaster occurs somewhere, I think of making a donation online. Often, though, I get discouraged somewhere along the way by the need to create a new user name and password and enter my credit card number; Amazon would have all that information already. Amazon rules over the buying habits of so many people because its hurdles are extremely low.
There are three types of hurdles to lower
There are different types of hurdles that should be lowered in order to acquire good habits: time and distance, procedures, and psychology. I’ll explain each of these.
First, there’s the hurdle of time and distance. It’s extremely enjoyable to run around the Imperial Palace. But it’s not easy to make it a habit if you have to get on the train and wait an hour to get there. It’s easier to continue running if you find a course near you. If you’re going to a gym, the most important thing is its proximity to your home. If there’s anything that you want to continue doing, the first thing to do is ensure that you can do it somewhere close by.
Next, there’s the hurdle of procedures. When I was acquiring the habit of going to the gym, I made an effort to reduce the number of things that I needed to bring with me. One day, I was dawdling around at home, wondering, “Should I go today or not?” I then listed all the procedures that awaited me at the gym and thought about what it was that was holding me back.
The gym is close to my home, and I can get there right away in my car. One thought that came to mind was: “It’s a hassle putting on and taking off spandex.” It’s a small thing, but the accumulation of small things will change the actions that people take. Although I thought it more stylish to sport athletic clothes I decided to wear a comfortable pair of ordinary pants. I stopped mixing my sports drinks with powder and switched to plain water. I also made my gym bag easier to use. Though these were little things, they produced big effects, since the result was that going to the gym became a habit.
Here’s some interesting advice on lowering procedure hurdles. Marathon runner Mari Tanigawa recommends wearing as your pajamas an outfit that you can immediately go out in, if you want to make morning runs in the winter a regular habit. Indeed, it should be easier to make a habit of running in the morning if you remove the hassle of getting changed in the cold.
We can’t skip psychological hurdles, either. For example, I encountered various psychological hurdles when I went to a yoga class for the first time. I thought, “I might be laughed at, since my body’s so stiff,” and “What will I do if I’m the only guy there?,” and so on and so forth.
But these are the types of hurdles that any beginner would feel. They’re also qualms that are addressed in the frequently asked questions of the yoga community. The body can be made flexible no matter how old you are. The stiffer your body, the more enjoyment you can get in the changes compared to people who are flexible to begin with. And more than anything, the objective of yoga isn’t to strike poses. Once I got a little used to it, I rather enjoyed the fact that there were few guys around.
Step 14: Realize that hurdles are more powerful than rewards
Faced with massive amounts of information before our eyes, we’re getting more and more impatient. While the bounce rate (or the percentage of visitors who enter a website and then navigate—“bounce”—away without viewing the other pages) for sites that reload within a maximum of two seconds is around 9 percent, almost 40 percent quit looking at the site when the reload time is five seconds.
In other words, regardless of how interesting the content on the site may be and no matter what fabulous products are being sold there, things that take time don’t get used.
Even if you decide to keep a diary, you’ll fail if Word keeps whirling around and refuses to launch. That’s why I typed mine in a basic text editor until keeping a diary became a habit. Because the text editor launched quickly and worked well, I didn’t quit while I waited for it to open. Logging the date was easy; I could just type “today” or “tomorrow,” and Google Japanese Input would convert it to the correct date.
People’s motivation will easily go away when faced with a simple hurdle.
Deciding to operate or donate an organ is also a hurdle
An example that behavioral economics researcher Dan Ariely introduces is pretty shocking.
When presented with a hypothetical case, in which they were considering whether to go forward with a planned surgery for a difficult case, many doctors decided not to operate after all when told that there was actually still one type of drug that had yet to be tested. If they were instead told there was a second drug type also available for testing, you would think that the doctors would then choose to first test both, and then decide between the two drugs or surgery. But surgery was often their first choice when given the option of two types of drugs. Doctors chose to operate when the alternative was another complicated decision.
The same thing can be said for important issues like organ donation.
Donation rates will drop when people are asked to enter a check mark if they would like to make a donation. The donation rate will rise when people are asked to enter a check mark if they would not like to make a donation. In short, when people are faced with a difficult issue like organ donation, they will hold off on making a decision and choose the default option.
Step 15: Raise the hurdle for habits that you want to quit
Because cracking pistachio shells is a lot of trouble, it’s easier to avoid eating too many of them compared with glazed nuts. I call this the pistachio theory. If there’s a habit that you want to quit, it’s important to raise the hurdle, and look for a preventative measure like those pistachio shells.
I noticed that if I had social media apps on my smartphone, I’d open them frequently. So I now look at them on my web browser and log out every time I finish. That way, there’s the trouble of the two-step verification of re-entering my user name and password if I want to view a social media site again, and, sometimes, I reconsider with that hurdle in mind.
When I was studying to get into
university, I developed a habit to prevent myself from neglecting my studies. I’d sit in my chair with my back to the wall, pulling the desk right up to me. I set it up so that even if I wanted to take a break, I wouldn’t be able to get up from my chair without going through the trouble of moving the heavy desk. It proved to be pretty effective.
In various situations, it is effective to limit yourself physically:
•Place your smartphone far away from you so you can’t use snooze right away when you get up in the morning.
•Use a debit card instead of a credit card so you can only use the money that you have in your account, which will reduce the likelihood of wasting your money.
If you don’t have a TV in the first place, you won’t be able to lounge around and watch it. Gretchen Rubin, author of Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits, suggests creating interesting hurdles and brings up noteworthy facts:
•Eat with your non-dominant hand to stop yourself from eating quickly.
•A bank robber opens a safe; all he finds inside are chocolates. In an effort to stop myself from eating too much I leave my favorite snacks in my car instead of the kitchen.
•The author Victor Hugo focused on his writing by having a servant hide his clothes so he wouldn’t be able to go out.
•Some alcoholics ask that the minibar be emptied when they check into a hotel.
I don’t trust willpower!
I can resist everything except temptation.
—Oscar Wilde
To construct hurdles like this is to not rely on such a thing as your own willpower. This strategy is based on the assumption that you can’t overcome temptation. One can say that this method deals with a person’s weaknesses in a calm manner.
The harshest example is from Greek mythology, and recounted in The Odyssey. The song of the half-woman, half-bird Sirens is seductive and appealing, but listening to it results in shipwreck and death. That’s why Odysseus prepared himself to hear it by having his crew tie him to a mast to prevent him from moving, and he told them, “If I plead with you to set me free, just tie me up tighter.”
In the manga series Ashita no Joe, Toru Rikiishi did the same thing. While trying to lose weight, he pleaded that he be “locked in a room.” But when the door was actually locked, he began to scream, “Open the door!” Toru Rikiishi knew that he would become a different person in the future from who he was at present.
Step 16: Spend money on your initial investment
I began studying classical guitar last year. Standard beginners’ guitars generally cost around $200 to $300, but there are expensive ones that cost tens of thousands of dollars. Of course I considered my budget, but I wanted to pick something nice. The guitar I bought cost a little over $5,000.
One approach to starting something new is to try it out with something cheap, which I don’t think is necessarily wrong. But if you spend a certain amount of money on something, then abandoning it would be a punishment of sorts to yourself. By not making use of it, you’re reminded of the wasted money that you spent. A higher-quality object, made from nice materials and with good design, could inspire you to pick it up.
Putting quality first is also useful for making something into a habit. When you’re exercising, you’ll be able to deal well with the tough initial period if you get shoes and apparel that will boost your spirit. Switch to a lovely handmade broomstick, and it’ll be easier to get started on the hassle of cleaning the house. Buy yourself an exciting umbrella, and the rainy season will be a little more enjoyable. You can’t underestimate the impact of these types of investments.
GOOD HABIT INHIBITOR: Not having the right tools
Manga artist Osamu Tezuka is often said to have been extremely demanding when he was working on something. Anecdotes include him not being able to draw without eating melon, and that he once said, “I need instant noodles from Shimokitazawa.” At times it must have been necessary for him to do and say things like that to handle the overwhelming volume of work that he did.
On a different scale: when I began mountain climbing, there were times when I stalled because I didn’t have the necessary equipment. It’s helpful to prepare tools that will make you feel good—and the right tools are sometimes necessary, just to go ahead and get started climbing a mountain.
Step 17: “Chunk down”
The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, then starting on the first one.
—Author unknown
When it comes to breaking down your tasks into smaller chunks, these words say it all. A chunk is a thick, solid piece of something. “Chunking down” means dividing up big chunks into smaller chunks.
When you feel that something is a hassle, that means multiple procedures are entangled. If you feel reluctant about doing something, I recommend writing down all the necessary steps. For example, there are various processes involved in starting to go to a gym:
•Buying training wear
•Buying shoes
•Checking the monthly membership fees and selecting a program
•Taking your ID with you and getting a membership card made
•Learning how to use the lockers and the machines
When all these steps are bouncing around in your head, it seems like a hassle. You keep worrying about the same things, and they go back and forth in your mind like this: “I’ll have to buy gym clothes and shoes if I want to work out, and as for membership fees, which program should I choose? The machines look complicated to use … but yeah, first, I’ll have to buy gym clothes.” When you start writing the steps down, they will appear more manageable. You’ll realize that you’ve been going over the same steps in your head, and there aren’t actually that many to worry about. Even if you can only advance by a day, you’ll someday arrive at your goal.
How to get over a fear of snakes
The psychologist Albert Bandura developed a method to overcome fear in a short period. For example, “chunking down” when you want to overcome a fear of snakes would go like this: If someone were to suddenly say to you, “There’s a snake in the room next door. Let’s go,” naturally, like most people, you’d reply, “I won’t go!” Instead, you should first take a peek at the room with the snake through a one-way mirror. It’s safe, like when you’re at a zoo. Then, you look inside through an open door. Once you get used to that, you take more small steps by putting on thick leather gloves, going inside the room, and touching the snake. When you’re able to touch the snake, you, who have always been afraid of snakes, might say, “This snake is so beautiful,” and put it on your lap.
Although it may be difficult to jump right into touching a snake, it’s possible to go little by little and take on something that you never thought you could do.
“Chunking down” to get up early in the morning
The same process applies to getting up early in the morning. Suddenly pushing away your blanket and jumping out of bed are the final results of a longer process of getting up. It’s often tough to do that during the cold winter. The entire process looks something like this:
•First, you open your eyes (your body may still remain lying down).
•You pull off half your blanket.
•You sit up on your bed.
•You get out of bed.
•You move away from your bed.
Tell yourself that you can go back to bed only if you get terribly sleepy after taking that step of moving away from your bed. The main reason why people end up going back to sleep isn’t that they did so after getting out of bed. It’s because they can’t get past step one, and stay in a state where their eyes aren’t even open.
How to ask someone out on a date
I like this example of “chunking down” from Stephen Guise’s Mini Habits: how to ask someone you like out on a date.
First, take one step in the direction that the person is standing, with your left foot
. Then, take a step with your right foot. You’ll eventually reach the spot where they’re standing. They’ll ask you, “Why are you walking in such a strange way?” That will be a cue for conversation.
Step 18: Make your targets ridiculously small
The reason why you can’t quit playing fun video games is the strategic setting of the game’s level of difficulty. It’s easy at first, then it gradually gets tougher to match the level of the progress of the player. It doesn’t take much time to obtain a reward for the next step in your development, either.
I remember the moment that I experienced a desire to quit playing video games. It was when I couldn’t defeat the boss character that kept making unreasonable attacks, regardless of how many times I kept at it. You only want to quit something when you can’t obtain a reward despite your best efforts, not when you obtain a reward and feel satisfaction. In that sense, habits are like crappy games. The level of difficulty is the highest at the start, making it necessary to lower the level of difficulty yourself.
The main reason why you can’t stick with something for longer than three days or so is because you haven’t lowered the level of difficulty in an adequate way. You make a New Year’s resolution, you’re raring to go right after New Year’s Day, you set several objectives, and you make an effort. Maybe you’ll feel like a new person for a few days, but you’ll eventually become reluctant to continue obtaining those objectives.